User blog:Drew1200/Major Changes to the Wiki
This wiki has been successfully adopted! We now have active administrators and bureaucrats who have full access to the wiki's customization features. I wanted to use this blog to plan and discuss any significant changes that we may make. I see Abatap has already made some changes, such as deleting a bunch of articles and updating our favicon. Great job with that, keep it up. :) Skin The skin currently has a dark green theme, which isn't awful, but is far from professional. I'd really like to make our skin more similar to that of farming-simulator.com, which has a fairly "light" theme, as opposed to the "dark" theme we currently have. I started working on a skin for this a couple days ago, and while it's far from complete, it gives a pretty accurate representation of what I'm envisioning. I took a screenshot available here. Again, it's far from complete, but it's a basis for the color scheme that I think would look nice. You can import my personal .css if you'd like to interact with the skin yourself. Wiki Features I'm personally a big fan of how most of the features are currently setup. I think the article comments are excellent for this wiki, and I like the talk pages more than the message walls. However, there are four changes I'd like to propose. First would be the Forums extension. Without this extension, discussions like this tend to take place on blogs, and I think forums are often much more suitable. Second would be chat, which I've found to be one of the best things a wiki can have. It strongly encourages interaction between users, and can quickly form a strong community unlike any other feature. In addition to this, it's a great way for users to find quick help, but it requires an account to use, which often ends up allowing many anonymous users to create accounts and even better, return to the site in the future. Third is the New Image Galleries feature. It's brand new, and isn't even that big of a change, but I think it could be beneficial for this wiki. You can research it for yourself if you'd like, but it basically just changes the appearance and functionality of galleries. I don't feel too strongly about this change, but I figured I'd propose it anyways. Fourth is Wikia's map extension. I think this would be an excellent extension to have on this wiki for the many different maps available in the various versions of Farming Simulator. What this extension would allow us to do is upload an image file of the map, and then pin different locations on the map. When you click on the pin, it displays the title, and links to the article about the topic. It's a very organized and smooth experience that resembles Google Maps. I have an example setup on my test wiki. It only has two pins, and it's pretty ugly since I only spent five minutes setting it up, but with a bit of effort it could be turned into a fantastic experience. Main Page My only comment on this is that I think our main page should be redesigned. It has decent content right now, but it'd be nice if it were similar to other wikis. I'm not too good at designed main pages, but I can work on it after I finish some of these other tasks. For now, I'm just listing it here as a change I think we should make. Policy There's not much of a rush for a policy at the moment, primarily because there's virtually no community, but like the main page, it's something we should work on eventually. I'm willing to write a draft next time I have the chance. Badge Tracks If we'd like, we could make some additional badge edit tracks, and give badges for things like editing FS13 articles and editing FS15 articles. Any other category works, too. Additional Content This would be a very long term plan, as we already have plenty of work to do. But at our current pace, we will eventually run out of content to add to this wiki. Despite the incredible wealth of information that exists on Farming Simulator, it is not infinite, and it is very much reachable. It's my personal opinion that a wiki should very stop adding new content, and that with very few exceptions, there's always more information that exists, you just have to sometimes "think out of the box". This proposition is to begin adding content from other games such as Construction Simulator, which are almost identical to Farming Simulator. Our "competitors" already do this type of thing. There's Farming Simulator forums with discussion places for Ski Region simulator, Demolition Company, etc. The criteria for this new content would be more finely established later, but for now we would just be looking for simulator games produced by the same people, which use the method of taking real life equipment, and creating a game with that. I'm not too familiar with some of the games such as Ski Region Simulator, but I have extensively played Construction Simulator 14, and that type of thing is exactly what I'd be looking for. If you have any comments, thoughts, or further propositions, please say so in the comments. Category:Blog posts